Points of Departure: Political Theology on the Scenes of Early Modernity
A conference convened by UCI and SUNY Buffalo under the direction of Julia Reinhard Lupton and Graham Hammill; sponsored by UCI’s Department of English, the Political Theology Group, the Program in Religious Studies, the Group for the Study of Early Cultures, [and the Departments of CL, French, German, and Spanish?], with additional support from UCLA’s Critical Religious Studies Group and the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo.
Friday, February 20 – Saturday, February 21, 2009.
In literary studies, the phrase “political theology” has come to designate the common sources and affiliations shared by politics and religion, as well as their antagonisms and internal resistances. In Renaissance and early modern studies, “political theology” unites scholars who aim to develop some of the texts and impulses associated with critical theory (especially psychoanalysis, later deconstruction, and the Baroque meditations of Walter Benjamin) in a direction defined by issues of secularization, sovereignty, and biopower in the Renaissance and in contemporary life. The phrase “political theology” has its origins in medieval iconographies of sacred kingship as distributed and displayed in the political, dramatic, and artistic forms of European civilization, along with the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and others in the seventeenth century. There is thus a special relationship between political theology as a critical approach to literature, politics, and thought and early modernity as a period and area of study.
This conference brings together established and emerging scholars in early modern studies who share an interest in the role that seventeenth century literature and thought has played in modern theories of secularization, sovereignty, and forms of life. We have asked speakers to address texts or moments from the early modern period that have served as a “point of departure” for later developments of politics and theology in modernity. Our goal is to present situated introductions to major figures in modern political theology, revealed through their exegetical engagements with early modern texts. The conference aims to make the case not only for the relevance of political theology as a critical discourse in the humanities today, but for the essential role that Renaissance and Baroque literature and thought have played in its pre- and post-histories.
Paolo Virno writes that we are in a new 17th century:
“The problem of our 17th century is this: how to make it so that this general intellect ceases being the principle productive force of capitalism and leads – based on a new public sphere – beyond the epoch of the State? In second place, there is the crisis of political representation. The transfer to the parliaments and the State, transfer of the capacity to decide politically, has always functioned with a collection of isolated “citizens” and atomized individuals as its presupposition. Each one participated in the public sphere through a delegation. Today, by contrast, each singular life presents itself immediately as a node of a “network”, part of a full and articulated social cooperation. The cooperative – and because cooperative, public – quality of this experience is not delegable. It escapes political representation. Put another way, the crisis of this “monopoly of political decision” that is the State expresses the crisis of private property in which there are anomalous goods like information, knowledge, language, and thought at play. The problem is how to construct organisms of non-representative democracy that reabsorb for themselves the power/knowledge concentrated today in the state administration. Finally: in our epoch, human praxis adapts in the most direct and systematic way the combination of requisites – linguistic faculty, self-consciousness, affect – that make praxis human. In other words, postfordist capitalism has “human nature” as such as its primary material. The aspects that distinguish our species don’t remain at the second level, as a background or implicit presupposition, but rather stand out, appear in full relief, leading to what are in play in social struggles. In our 17th century the principle problem is: what is the political form to give to the basic prerogatives of the species homo sapiens?”
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